LINQPad is also a great way to learn LINQ: it comes loaded with 500 examples from the book, C# 4.0 in a Nutshell. There’s no better way to experience the coolness of LINQ and functional programming.

And LINQPad is more than a LINQ tool: it’s an ergonomic C#/VB/F# scratchpad that instantly executes any expression, statement block or program with rich output formatting – the ultimate in dynamic development. Put an end to those hundreds of Visual Studio Console projects cluttering your source folder!

Best of all, LINQPad standard edition is free and can run without installation (or with a low-impact setup). The executable is 3MB and is self-updating.

On-demand report processing for each user who views a report. When a user opens a report, the report is initialized, the query is processed, data is merged into the report layout, and the report is rendered into a presentation format.

Rendering formats are available for HTML, Acrobat, and Excel.

Report data sources must be SQL Server relational databases that run locally in SQL Server Express.

Configuration is supported through the Reporting Services Configuration tool.

Rs.exe, rsconfig.exe, and rskeymgmt.exe command line utilities are available in SQL Server Express.

Windows authentication and predefined roles are used to map existing group and user accounts to a named collection of operations.

Unsupported Features

Other editions of SQL Server 2005 include a larger set of Reporting Services features. The following list describes the features that are documented in SQL Server Books Online, but cannot be used in this edition:

I’ve been across this one so many times before, so I’m adding this entry to remind myself how to automatically deploy compiled libraries to the GAC and recycle the application pool after a successful compilation in Visual Studio 2005/2008:

Add this on the post build events of the Class Library project for quick GAC deployment

In my last post, titled “10 Tools Which I Left After Using VSTS 2008″, I have included a list of 10 tools which I am not using currently, as I have the corresponding features available in Visual Studio Team System 2008. However, on the other hand, I am still using few tools even I have VSTS 2008!

6. Office Visio 2007: Although Visual Studio has support for diagramming, however Office Visio 2007 is still # 1 choice for me, with respect to analyzing, modeling, designing the application system on which I am working on. It contains a wide range of support of notation, including UML, Enterprise Application, Prototyping.

7. Copy Source As HTML: Bloogers like me, always needs to copy own source code from Visual Studio IDE, to be posted. This tool serves me this purpose.

8. Spell Checker: Its really a nice thing, if my code don’t have any spell mistakes, which can occur frequently. Wonderful tool to help developers!

9. SysInternalSuite: A nice system spy tool for developers and system admin. It contains lots of useful tools, to investigate the system with respect to the current execution of your application.

10. Employee Info Starter Kit: An excellent ASP.NET starter kit, which includes most of the web and coding best practices. Helps web developers to reduce start-up preparation time for web application.

I have started using Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2008, recently. Previously I worked with Visual Studio 2005. As a matter of fact I had to use lots of external tools to perform and speedup my development process. However, while working with VSTS 2008, it’s very exciting for me that, I found replacements for most of the external tools there.